


From Madrid to Heaven

by mgwashere



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Chloe Decker Finds Out, Gen, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Needs A Hug, Minor Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, Post-Devil Face Reveal to Chloe Decker, Post-Season/Series 03, Unbetaed we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 04:49:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20942534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mgwashere/pseuds/mgwashere
Summary: Contrary to popular belief, Chloe Decker's European trip did not start in Rome.





	From Madrid to Heaven

“ [Madrid] holds unique bragging rights for having what is commonly acknowledged as the only public monument to the Devil himself.”--[Atlas Obscura](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/fountain-fallen-angel)

Chloe Decker never intended to end up in Rome. She vaguely knew, of course, of the religious importance of the city. But as someone who had never believed in anything, that information was ultimately useless for her, stored somewhere in the back of her head. So when her entire belief system came crashing down in front of her, Rome wasn’t a place of faith or comfort to her. She didn’t intend to leave in search for answers, she was merely running away like any other sensible atheist would do in that situation. She knew she needed to go somewhere far enough that he couldn’t easily go after her, yet interesting enough to hold Trixie’s attention, and so she settled for Europe. The UK was out of the question (too many chances of running into someone that spoke like him. Also why did he have an English accent?) Instead, she decided to go to Spain. In part because it would be an easier sell for Dan (“She can practice her Spanish with someone other than you”). But ultimately, she chose Spain because there was nothing about the country that she could immediately associate with him. While he had shared an abundance of stories of his debauchery in Paris and London, and half of all his clothing items were made by Italian designers. But of Spain, he said, well, _nada_. 

But choosing Madrid specifically had been a bit of a whim, and as they boarded their plane only a few days after it happened, Chloe realized she didn’t have much of an idea of what they were to do in the city. She had found a cheap-ish hotel with a tacky name in English near the Atocha train station, and that was the extent of all her travel planning. Luckily, Trixie had been very excited by the trip, and enthusiastically took over all the tour guide planning of the trip during the plane ride over. In a few hours, her daughter had learned everything there was to know and do in the city. But the internet seemed to have its limitations: Despite the claims of several websites that Madrid was one of the sunniest cities in all of Europe, Chloe and Trixie were welcomed by heavy rain. The cab driver that drove them to the hotel mentioned in broken English that he had never seen so much rain in the summer. Chloe couldn’t help but wonder if there had been some sort of divine intervention involved in all of that, but then she remembered Lucifer’s claim that his Father was “in no way meteorologically-inclined”. 

The rain continued during their first two days in Madrid. At first, this didn’t tamper down Trixie’s excitement. Their hotel was conveniently placed nearby the three most important art museums in the city, and they spent nearly a full day in each one of them. Chloe enjoyed the Reina Sofía best: while some of the stuff was a little weird, it was still pretty interesting. Above all, it was all very recent and that made it far more tangible. Nearly all of the art was about something or reacting to something, so she had to fully immerse herself in the audio guide information to truly understand what she was watching.

The other museums were harder. Modern art was decisively non-religious, but the same could not be said of other historical periods. The other museums had a large collection of Medieval and Renaissance art, and so much of it was biblical. That word, one she had never really given much thought to, now had a completely different meaning for her. Because amongst the many implications behind Lucifer’s revelation, Chloe now had to start accepting that a book she had dismissed all her life as mythology contained several truths about mankind and the universe. This also meant that the painting in room 056 of the Prado Museum, (16th century, oil on canvas) was not just a mythical story, but imaging of how her ex-fiance, Cain, murdered his brother. The worst part was that she laughed at it because her first thought was “He so doesn’t look like that”. And just like that, it all hit her. Because just a few weeks ago Chloe Decker had been engaged to Marcus Pierce. And while she hadn’t loved Marcus, she had loved everything he represented: a normal life with a reliable and responsible partner. Now Marcus was dead, but it turns out that he had never been Marcus, but instead a mythical figure come to life, the world’s first murderer. And she had refused to marry him because she was in love with the Devil.

She started hyperventilating right then and there, in room 056. Trixie immediately ran to her side, and normally seeing her daughter’s concerned face would be enough for her to pull herself together. But now that the floodgates had opened all she could think about when she was her daughter’s face was the potential danger she had put her under. She had nearly married a murderer. No, she had nearly married the first murderer ever. She’d also moved in with an actual demon from hell, and had let said demon babysit her daughter nearly every single day. 

And then all the things she felt were weird but she still accepted began to scare her: the fact that Maze taught her daughter how to use knives, a skill she probably gained from torturing people in hell. And what other hellish activities had she allowed her daughter to be exposed to? Had she condemned her daughter’s soul to damnation out of her willful ignorance? The museum's security guards had acted quickly. And for a second she felt like that was true like she was about to die. This hadn’t been the first time Chloe Decker thought she was about to die, but it was the first time she did with the knowledge that heaven and hell were real. But, of course, Chloe didn’t die.

“You had a panic attack” the museum medic informed her in a rude tone that she now knew was idiosyncratically Spanish. “I can prescribe you something for now, but you should go see your doctor when you go back to your country.” She refused the pills but promised to check up with a therapist once she was back in LA. She thought for a second of texting Linda but realized she didn’t want to talk about it with her friend. After all, the first question she would ask would probably be “So why do you think you had a panic attack?” And what as Chloe supposed to say to that? “Oh, I just found out that Lucifer, the patient that you had sex with, is the Devil.” That night, she told Trixie that Marcus’ death had been harder on her than she imagined, and that she had a lot of things to process but that she was ok. Trixie cried but as usual, she tried to act like she was grown up, and said she understood.

* * *

The Madrid weather quickly went from rainy to all over the place. Some mornings were bright and sunny, but as the day progressed it would start to rain violently for a few hours. Other days were misty and cloudy, but the rain would never come. All in all, it made for a pretty frustrating tourist experience, particularly for Trixie. Chloe had claimed that her panic attack had been triggered in part by the large crowd at the museum, which prompted her daughter to cut down their scheduled museum visits. This meant that the only thing to do was to walk around the city under the constant threat of thunder and rain. And after the first few days of shopping and eating tours, there wasn’t much to captivate her daughter’s attention. On the third day, after downpour hit them on the way out of the pyramids, Trixie asked if she could stay in the hotel watching TV for the afternoon. After that day, Trixie staying in during the afternoon and watching TV became part of the routine. But Chloe had been so consumed by her anxiety that she would find any excuse to go out of the hotel and walk through the city, without any purpose or direction. Trixie claimed she did not mind spending hours alone in the hotel, especially since Chloe would always return with a treat of some sort.

Chloe found that she loved walking around the city aimlessly. It was a luxury that she could never afford in LA, but she had found those were the only moments of peace she could get. And once she walked away from the touristy quarters of the city, she found that she loved Madrid. The city was old but it wasn’t glamorous or fashionable. And depending on the day, these walks provided her with the opportunity to look back at the last months of her life with something similar to objectivity.

She began making a series of mental lists of things that she now knew about the universe, much like this was the evidence on a case. First was the lists of things she now knew for certain: God was real, Angels were real, and so were Heaven and Hell. Lucifer was the Devil, but he got tired of it and moved to LA. Maze was a demon and she came with him from hell. The Bible had true information, but it wasn’t 100% accurate. A lot of things she had suspected about Lucifer early on in their relationship had started to make sense. Next was the list of things she didn’t understand like God has been married to Charlotte Richards (how?) or how Lucifer was immortal but she was still able to shoot him (he seemed to have been genuinely surprised at that one). 

Eventually, these questions began to be easier to come to terms with. After all, the whole point of being an atheist was not believing in things that could not be proven. Now that she had proof, the question was no longer if she believed or not. She had simply discovered how the Universe worked. After she had rationalized it all, she began to feel oddly ok about it all. It was comforting, she supposed, that there was some form of justice beyond her own. She knew she was a pretty great cop, and she tried to give her job her all. But she also knew better than anyone that the system was imperfect. If her last case had proven anything, it was that criminals constantly got away with what they did, especially if they were white and wealthy. The hard part wasn’t coming to terms with Heaven and Hell, but making sense of the complicated relationship (love affair?) that she had with its ruler.

While these questions still hung around in her head, after her third afternoon promenade, Chloe was finally beginning to get over the immense panic and fear that had taken over her life for the last few days. That was also the day when Chloe decided to continue her walk inside the Retiro Park. She and Trixie had been to Retiro already, originally to spend most of the day there. Chloe had quickly changed her mind after seeing just how much they were charging for food inside the park. As such, they hadn’t explored much of the park, and she went in, searching for the Rose garden one of the hotel clerks had insisted she visit. But after entering the park she had stopped paying attention to where she was going, distracted by her devilish predicament.

It wasn’t the first time Chloe had spent trying to figure out Lucifer. Everything about the man had always been an utter mystery to her, but after nearly two years working with him, she had thought she had him figured out. There was some real trauma behind his playboy facade, one that probably stemmed from an abusive parent. She had guessed that Lucifer’s father was some sort of authoritarian religious leader, who went too far when punishing his son as a teenager. Everything else about the man (the accent, the Devil persona, the paranoia, the metaphors that seemingly extended to every aspect of his existence) were all part of a complex coping mechanism that hopefully he and Linda would be able to work through. And ultimately, Lucifer’s constant claims that he was the Devil weren’t harming anyone. She’d figured that if that’s what got him out of bed every morning, she wasn’t going to complain about it. Of course, there were other things she had to ignore to be okay with that explanation, like Ammenadiel’s insistence that she not test his brother’s blood, or why Maze managed to be just as weird as Lucifer despite not being related to him. But ultimately she felt like she was able to dismiss those questions because they didn’t change the fundamental aspects of the story: that Lucifer was just a normal guy with an unusual way of getting over his issues. But now that entire reality had shattered, and she had no idea how she was supposed to make sense of him.

And because her life had now been reduced to what she could only assume was a cosmic joke, that was when she aimlessly walked into the park and saw him. At first, she wasn’t exactly sure that it was meant to be him: from where she was walking all she could tell was that it was the statue of a winged boy. But as she walked closer to it she realized that there was something not quite right with his image. His body language was all wrong; one of his wings was behind his arm, supporting him onto the ground, while the other one pointed out at the sky. The angel was looking up at the sky, his face contorted in a painful grimace. He looked like he’s either crying or yelling something out at the heavens. His throne was a rock, and he was chained there by a serpent tangled around his legs.

And at first, just like the painting of Marcus, her first thought was about the inaccuracies. The bronze Lucifer looked like a teenager: slim, with a round face, and deep-set eyes. Nothing to do with the six-foot-tall, designer-clad playboy she knew. But then she realized that she didn’t know that. Sure, as far as she was aware Lucifer was immortal, but she supposed that he had at still point been a child, right? She knew he had rebelled against his father, so it wasn’t impossible that the rebelling Lucifer had looked like the lanky, long-haired teenager who was looking up at the heavens. And you know he has another face, a voice whispered in her head. The thought that Lucifer’s appearance could be fake made her dizzy. She had spent so much time during their partnership both ignoring and taking in his appearance that it not being his own terrified her to no end. But she supposed it also made sense-- after all, wouldn’t the D evil want to make himself look as tempting as possible?

But despite the many new unnerving questions that the statue had raised, it was also the closest thing to sympathy for Lucifer she had ever seen. And ironically it was also the most accurate of portraits. Even though the face and body and hair were all wrong, now that she knew the truth, it was so easy for her to imagine Lucifer, chained by his pride to a rock, and crying out to the heavens in pain. She wondered if it was possible for the real Lucifer to have inspired this work in some way She took a few pictures of the statue and for a minuscule second she even considered the possibility of sending the pictures to her partner. She had even started writing some bad jokes to accompany her pictures (At first she wrote “Fancy seeing you here” before deleting it and replacing it with “So THIS is what you looked like in high school”). But before she attached the picture to her message she realized that she was about to text the actual Devil. She was about to text the Devil a picture of a statue-like some silly joke like he wasn’t the ruler of hell and she wasn’t some tiny minuscule human soul. She deleted the text and proceeded to get rid of the pictures before walking back towards the hotel.

That night, it hailed in Madrid. It terrified the both of them, but Trixie in particular, when a piece hail flew in and nearly hit the TV as she was watching reruns of Leave it to Leslie. Chloe went down to the hotel lobby, where the receptionist informed her that the Meteorological Agency had issued a special alert, recommending people to stay indoors. Chloe could tell that Trixie was getting tired of being in the city, after all, there was only so much they could do with the climate they had been having. She suggested to Trixie that they stayed until the end of the week (mostly to not pay a hotel cancellation fee) and then they could go to Barcelona. From there they could think of going to France and Germany.

She knew that eventually, they’d have to return to LA. While she did have enough savings for a decent vacation, she also couldn’t afford and indefinite stay in Europe. But still, a few days in Madrid hardly counted as a vacation, and she promised Trixie she’d stay up looking for cheap flights and a hotel in Barcelona. But, instead, she found herself googling the statute she had seen in the park that day. The search revealed to her some information about the statue and how it ended up in the park. The sculptor had been inspired by Paradise Lost. Still, she wondered if perhaps there was a closer connection between the artist and Lucifer. She googled the man’s name alongside ‘Lucifer’ and ‘Lucifer Morningstar’ to see if there was any documentation of the two having met at any point. She knew it was a stretch (I mean, who was to say if Lucifer even used the same name in different countries?). The search got her nowhere, and she ended up falling asleep halfway through an incredibly dull article on 19th century Spanish sculpture.

* * *

The same weather alert was still on for the next morning, and Trixie asked if they could go back to the Reina Sofía museum to explore some of the other wings. Chloe agreed, happy that at least they would be safe from more hailstorms. The second visit was even more enjoyable than the first, and they even found a bookstore adjacent to the museum that had a large selection of books in English. Trixie left with a few new books and graphic novels and the return of her trademark cheerful attitude. She began reading through them the moment they got back to the hotel, while Chloe pretended to finish their travel plans for Barcelona.

But the notion of leaving Madrid unsettled her. She had fled to Europe hoping the physical distance between her and Lucifer would help her both accept and forget what had happened. Instead, she had constantly been confronted with it all, and she was worried that another city would simply bring more confrontations. The statue, in particular, had unnerved because it led her down the most uncomfortable elements of this new realization: Lucifer. Because if anyone had asked her a few weeks ago, she would have said that she loved him. But he had (quite literally) transformed into a different person in front of her and she just didn’t know what she was supposed to do with that. She could feel herself starting to shake just thinking about it, and knew immediately that she needed to leave the hotel room. She grabbed a raincoat she’d bought a few days ago, promising Trixie to return with something sweet and chocolaty.

The sun hadn’t been visible during the day, yet by the time Chloe found herself once again under the Fountain of the Fallen Angel a pinkish hue had taken over the Madrid sky. Under the clouds and shadows, Angel’s expression seemed even more agonized, his posture more melancholy. And there she was, looking at an interpretative statue of the <strike>man</strike> Devil she loved, hoping it could somehow answer all of her questions. The statue’s grimace of pain quite literally playing the Devil’s advocate in her head. Despite her fears, it reminded her of the same times when she had seen him just as lost and hurt as the Angel on the statue, reminded her of the man she had known Lucifer as. And for a moment, she nearly followed that instinct. Call him she told herself to call him and ask him, he’s never lied to you and man won’t lie to you now. She could imagine his face and his sad, lopsided smile and in his stupid and possibly fake accent; “Point of pride, Detective” And, perhaps, if the Madrid weather had been so inclined, Chloe Decker would have sat down in a nearby bench and dialed Lucifer Mornigstar’s number. Or maybe she would have returned to her hotel and booked a flight back to LA. But in that moment lightning stroke, casting a pale shadow over the statue of the Angel. And at that moment, Lucifer’s burnt red face came back into her mind, and with it the fear and confusion. But unlike her last encounter with the Devil, this time she screamed.

An hour later, Chloe Decker had returned to the hotel room to find her daughter sitting down and watching TV once again. As promised, she returned with two warm cups of hot chocolate and churros.

“Monkey, I know I said we were going to go to Barcelona. But I just had this idea…”

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I'm a long time fanfic lurker that could never write fanfiction. But I was too interested in exploring Chloe's mind a bit between Seasons 3 and 4. And I also just wanted an excuse to talk about the Fallen Angel fountain in Madrid. The stormy weather is an actual description of this last summer in Madrid (including but not limited to hailstorms).  
Also, this has no beta so any corrections or edits will be appreciated


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